a glorified internet "Yellow Pages"?
I agree 100% with White Shoes. Yahoo and AOL are two completely different animals. In short, Yahoo is an Internet stock and AOL isn't. IMHO, the Internet is, if anything, under-hyped. Yep, underhyped. The Internet will eventually supersede all of the currently existing media: TV, print, radio, film, CD-ROMs, CDs, everything. The Internet *is* digital convergence. Take the total revenue from all those media and add them together, then add to that the software industry, both off-the-shelf and custom. The number you arrive at is the Internet's potential revenue/market.
Yahoo is much more than a glorified yellow pages. The people running it are very smart, and know how to build. It started as a search engine. It has become a community, a magazine, a content provider, even an ISP. I wouldn't go long Yahoo right now given its valuation, but neither would I short it, because it knows its business and is making the right moves.
AOL, on the other hand, is a proprietary pseudo-Internet kludge that is benefitting from the growth of what is really a rival, the Internet, and a lack of marketing-savvy competitors up till now.
Over time, the difference between AOL's and Yahoo's relation to the Internet will become increasingly clear, and that time will work in Yahoo's favor and against AOL's.
rhet0ric |
